“... sexuality to an encounter group for unhappy smalltown housewives. (One of them recalls that ‘the French like black people, or might be black themselves – she wasn’t sure.’) She writes knowingly about voucher-based efforts to keep school segregation in place, and about the ideological formation that the authorities wish to foster in talented black ...”

“... of four thousand Jews, the Germans claimed they were adhering to a prewar plan drawn up by the French architect Eugène Beaudouin. In this case, destruction from the air proved unnecessary. New boulevards, highways and modern buildings replaced the picturesque squalor of the ancient settlement, much to the regret of many of those who eventually moved ...”

“... at the mercy of the Hot Hand, mere surfers on the inexorable waves of chance like everyone else? Patrick Barclay’s portrait of José Mourinho, with its subtitle ‘Anatomy of a Winner’, promises an answer to these questions. But in fact it simply confirms how little thought even the best football writers are willing to give to the workings of chance in ...”

“... wasn’t in the intellectual league of Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford or Manchester’s Patrick Blackett or London’s J.D. Bernal, but he had certain virtues that made him ideal for the position of Churchill’s personal scientist. He was posh, rich, well mannered, well connected and Tory – and that wasn’t typical of the British scientific ...”

“... February. For much of last year the post in Gloucester Crescent was delivered by a delightful French girl, Stephanie Tunc; blonde and pretty, she was chatty, funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance she didn’t like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on ...”

“... well. And in spring 1924 he passed the Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate examination in English, French, mathematics, physics and chemistry, German and dynamics. Instead of staying at school for an extra year, Todd decided to go directly to the University of Glasgow, failing to secure an entrance scholarship because he was unable to answer the questions in ...”

“... solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak ...”

“... too had a friend called Beamish, Noelle Beamish, an Irish lesbian lady who lived in the same French village during the war and left her long, utilitarian drawers out to dry beside her younger companion’s little frilly knickers. On the way back I know that I will miss lunch in the Conrad so I turn, hardly thinking at all, into the new foyer of the ...”

“... 17th-century mélange of folk wisdom, medical knowledge and social commonplaces – and the French physician Nicolas Venette’s The Art of Conjugal Love provided pro-natalist, heterosocial, guilt-free guides to better sex within marriage for the artisanal classes and their betters of the middling sort, respectively. Both extolled the naturalness of sex ...”

“... are fairly recent. It has long been assumed that the niceties of theory are congenial to French Cartesians, and to Americans, whose literature, in any case, floats free of terrestrial commitment, but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen ...”

“... great actresses and six only. These are Bernhardt, Réjane, Mrs Kendal, Ellen Terry, Duse and Mrs Patrick Campbell.’ The times have changed. If there are any great actresses in 1986, nobody is writing plays for them. Agate met a Frenchwoman in 1917, married and speedily divorced her. He wanted London guardsmen. Arnold Bennett noted in his diary: J.E. Agate ...”

“... addition of a toilet and shower. I added on a room out the back door and put in a bathroom like a French bordello, all tile and glowing figures. I had a septic tank sunk in the back haggard and declared the place all the more habitable for the trouble. But for every luxury there is a loss. Just as the installation of a phone when Nora was 80 cost her the ...”

“... Konwicki give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish ...”

“... north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring ...”

“... his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton Strachey, had been a Bloomsbury hostess ...”